Resource Management

Use the Resource Management application to assign employees to project plans and monitor their utilization.

Typically, project managers are responsible for updating their plans on a monthly basis by looking at planned assignments and adjusting resources as needed. Using Resource Management, project managers can make changes to future planned hours or change employee assignments.

As these changes are made, Resource Management provides project managers with immediate feedback on how employee utilization and estimates at completion are affected and how the EAC compares to the plan's budget. Project managers can identify over- and under-utilized employees.

The system administrator may set up alerts that display whenever EAC exceeds the plan's budget.

Hard and Soft Booked Hours

Resource Management allows you to use hard booked hours, soft booked hours, or a blend of hard and soft booking for resource assignments.

• Hard booked — An employee’s assignment to a plan is scheduled and approved.
• Soft booked — An employee is tentatively scheduled on a plan but the assignment has not yet been approved.
• Blend — Resource assignments include a mixture of hard and soft booked resources.

To use hard and soft booking, you must turn on the hard/soft booking options in Configuration > Planning > Resource Settings.

Search for Resources

Use the Resource Management search to find the resources you need, based on specific search criteria. While using Resource Utilization, you can search planned hours to determine how resources are utilized. And with Generic Assignments, you can search for an established "generic" category of employee that has scheduled, planned hours and replace the generic resource with one or more named employees.

Use the Resource Search dialog box to select multiple criteria for limiting your search and, once the appropriate resource is found, assigning the resource. For example, you can search for a resource based on:

• Organization
• Labor Category
• Skills
• Availability
• Provisional Rates
• Advanced Search Criteria

You can save these searches for future use, and select each item for inclusion or exclusion as criteria for finding the appropriate resource match.

Generic Resources

Generic Resources are generic labor category or labor code placeholders that represent resource assignments in a plan. After the plan is awarded and work begins, you may change the generic resources to actual employees who are responsible for the tasks.

You establish generic resources as labor categories in the Billing application.

Over- and Under-Utilized Resources

In Configuration > Planning > Resource Settings, your system administrator defines the thresholds that will be used to determine if an employee is over- or under-utilized or over- or under-scheduled.

Security Access

In Security, your system administrator determines the level of access that each role has to Resource Management screens. Each role may have full, read-only, or no access to Resource Management.

Access rights that you specify on the Resource Utilization screen override the access rights for a project plan. For example, a project manager could use Resource Utilization to change many plans at one time, even though that role does not have access to some of those plans. To prevent these situations, you should provide read-only access to these screens in Vision Security.

Your system administrator also determines which roles (users) have the ability to create and save favorites and/or searches. Roles with full access may use the Advanced Search feature to create and save favorite reports and searches.

Alerts

You can set up alerts that are triggered when the following events take place:

• Resource utilization percentages exceed, or fall short of, percentage thresholds that you specify for a plan.
• Resource assignments for a plan have been made by someone other than the original author of that plan.
• Budget milestone amounts or percentages have been reached. You can also monitor specific accounts and/or vendors within a plan, notify users when a plan is first associated with (mapped to) a project, or when a plan's baseline has changed.
• A new plan is created, an existing plan is modified or deleted, or a new project is created from a plan.
• A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) level is added or deleted from a plan.
• There is a change to the baseline after you save the current version of the plan as the baseline version.
• The estimate-at-completion hours or amount exceeds the established baseline for the plan.

If you want the alert to be sent only to a small subset of the employees in the database, you can use the employee lookup in the alert configuration to select specific employees.